Ex-child soldier's literary bestseller is 'factually flawed'

He is a former child soldier whose account of being a cocaine-addicted killer forced to fight in Sierra Leone's civil war was a literary sensation.

More than 600,000 people have bought Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone, which received rave reviews from authors such as William Boyd and Sebastian Junger, was marketed in Starbucks and which was number three in Time magazine's top 10 non-fiction books last year.

Now an Australian newspaper suggests there may be serious flaws in the young man's account of his life as a teenage killing machine, forced to become part of a government corps of boy soldiers before being rescued by Unicef, the UN's children's agency.

It claims that the orphan and teenage survivor of Sierra Leone's civil war, in which tens of thousands of people were massacred and much of the population displaced, appears 'mistaken' about the timing of key events related in the book. After carrying out investigations in Sierra Leone, the Australian newspaper alleges that Beah was 15 and not 13 when he was recruited into the army and that he therefore served only a few months as a child soldier and not two years as he has claimed in the book.

The inquiries were prompted by an Australian couple who read A Long Way Gone and are admirers of Beah. Mining engineer Bob Lloyd, from Perth, went to Sierra Leone last year to manage the titanium mine where Beah's father used to work and met a man who turned out to be a relative of the former child soldier.

The couple was so pleased with their discovery that they tried to contact Beah. After investigating the story further, they uncovered the discrepancies in dates.

According to the Lloyds, when they contacted Beah's US publishers Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, the Australian distributors HarperCollins and Laura Simms, the American woman who eventually fostered Beah, they were treated with hostility. They were then put in touch with the Australian.

The newspaper claims the rebel attack that opens Beah's book, which caused the deaths of his parents and two brothers and led to him becoming a child soldier, happened in 1995, two years after he said it did. Its claims are accompanied by interviews with Beah's teacher Abdul Barry, who insists Beah was at school in 1993 and 1994 - the years when he said he was a child soldier - and Sylvester Basopan Goba, acting chief of the local town of Mattru Jong, which was overrun by rebels.

Goba also says the author's account of events is correct but that he has got his dates wrong. 'The only way any of us survived was by using a footpath through the swamp which was the one thing the rebels had not noticed. I tell you that none of that happened in 1993,' he said.

Civil war crippled Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, forcing the displacement of half of the estimated 4.5 million population, prompting the massacre and mutilation of tens of thousands of people and forcing many children into fighting for the government or the rebel Revolutionary United Front.

Beah was one of those caught up in the savagery. He wrote that he became so morally corrupted that he shot people as easily as he would drink a glass of water. Like other child soldiers, he blocked out what was happening with drugs such as 'brown-brown' - a mix of cocaine and gunpowder.

Unicef rescued him when he was 16 and sent him to a rehabilitation centre. He has since become an advocate for children caught up in the horrors of war, speaking at the United Nations and other international gatherings. He is now 28 and lives in New York.

'If confirmed, these revelations do not mean Beah's tale isn't truly terrible,' the Australian said. 'They don't mean that he hasn't been through experiences that most of us in the developed world will never have to face even in our nightmares. But this does raise questions about the way Ishmael Beah's book came out and how thoroughly his story was checked out.'

The newspaper adds that the saga is 'complicated by what seems to be unquestioning and passionate belief in the young author from his publishers, guardian and agent'.

The Lloyds say they meant only to help reunite Beah with a member of his family and are unhappy that they have unwittingly caused the controversy.